Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the D-Mods of 2010
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319: The River Author: Synbi Release Date: June 9, 2010
"Is this the river's source? I doubt it, I can't see any treasure here."
Synbi was one of my beta testers on "Malachi the Jerk." If it weren't for him, I might well have released a version that crashed frequently on regular 1.08. Thanks again to him for that.
"The River" came in second place in the contest. It's quite a big D-Mod with sidequests and an interesting story, but I'm not sure it's really a non-combat D-Mod, despite the fact that you're hardly ever given the chance to strike anything.
Dink is at home with his live-in girlfriend when the taxman comes to collect. Dink can't pay, so the collector somehow takes Dink's fist as payment. Dink never does gain the ability to punch things in this adventure. As Dink despairs about being broke, his lover attempts to console him with a saying about treasure waiting at the end of the river. This works a little too well. She tries to explain that it's only a saying and that the river is probably just the metaphorical "river of life," but Dink's mind is made up. He is determined to follow the river just outside their house all the way to its source, where he is convinced he'll find incredible riches. Indeed, although Dink's journey takes him to several different places and leads him to pursue many different goals, you never stop following that river. You can even press the R key and Dink will tell you which way the river is flowing if it's in sight, which is handy because it doesn't appear to flow in any particular direction with those ol' water tiles.
There comes a point where the flow of the river can no longer be seen, but Dink presses on anyway.
The beginning is appropriate for a story that ends up being somewhat metaphorical itself. Dink may well be following the River of Life, as the four towns Dink stops in seem to represent different phases of his life. Early on, Dink acts with the impetuousness of youth, getting drunk and starting fights. Later, he settles down with a woman (another one, too bad for his girlfriend at the start) and works a regular, boring job in order to provide for her and himself. When Dink finally arrives at the river's source, he's told that he has become old, even though his journey couldn't have taken that much time if interpreted literally. Dink does find his treasure at the end of the river, but having come to the end of the River of Life, there is nothing left to do but die.
Death has the same theme song he did in "Initiation." I approve.
It does confuse the metaphor a bit that you can always backtrack. If you go all the way back to the start and talk to Dink's old girlfriend, she asks him if he's seeing someone else. He lies and tells her that he isn't. I really don't understand why. He's clearly established a new life and has no intention of ever returning; why doesn't he just own up to it?
Speaking of backtracking, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. Along the way Dink faces some interesting challenges. He has to defend a town from monsters despite being unable to hit them (his actions later cause the destruction of the same town, so I guess it evens out). This segment is why I say "The River" isn't a non-combat D-Mod. You have to get the enemies to hit each other in order to kill them. When there's one left, you have to dodge them for a while as another character casts a spell. It's an interesting combat challenge - amusingly enough, the gameplay took me back to the time I challenged "Bill & Kill" - but it's a combat challenge nonetheless. I think the idea of the contest was to create D-Mods that did not require the player to defeat enemies.
I was impressed that the script covers the rare eventuality of the monsters wiping each other out simultaneously.
My biggest gripe with the D-Mod came around this point. There's yet another bar with patrons having a discussion in the background; here, they're debating politics. I really would prefer to avoid serious discussion of politics in a D-Mod, and this discussion annoyed me especially because I think the political opinions in question are kinda batty. Worse, the "debate" is one-sided and feels like a soapbox. I am tempted to argue against the points made here and present real-world examples of how the things this character implies would create an ideal society reliably make things much worse in practice, but I'd only be doing the same thing that got on my nerves when the D-Mod did it. These writeups aren't the place for this sort of thing either. At least you're not required to interact with this character.
There are several side objectives in this D-Mod. At the end, you receive a score based on how many of these objectives you completed. Some of the stuff you have to do to get the best rating is really obscure, and I can't imagine getting it before finding out what the criteria are in the ending unless you use the walkthrough, as I did. There were a couple of parts where it wasn't clear what to do to progress the story. I'm thinking particularly of a spot where a character tells you to meet them at the bar, and nothing happens until you walk to a totally unrelated screen. But then, my threshold for how stuck I have to get to check a walkthrough is unusually low because of the sheer volume of D-Mods I'm going through. Anyway, one of the sidequests involves making a deal with the devil, but backing out. If you go through with it, you get the bad ending.
Striker cameos in this ending. "Back from the Grave" references abound.
A considerable amount of time is taken up by the segment where you have to plant, harvest and sell crops to make enough money to pay off a house. It's a good hike to the places where you can get the best prices. Slowing you down further are occasional crop failures and Dink's old nemesis the taxman, who taxes your income every ten days (you pass a day by resting, and each crop takes a certain number of days to grow). In addition to buying the house, you can also pay to furnish it, which is one of the sidequests that contributes to your final score. The farming segment gets a little tedious, but I appreciated the new gameplay wrinkle. Besides, I think it had to be a little tedious to portray the part of Dink's life where he becomes a more responsible adult. It worked well.
This is what the house looks like when fully furnished.
I liked the atmosphere of this D-Mod. The map looked good, and the MIDI selections were excellent. Toward the end, there's a very cool segment set in an alternate dimension, where the groovy-looking space background shifts around oddly. I had to include a screenshot of this.
Yes it is.
I know the ending sounds like a downer, but I found it oddly uplifting. Dink does seem disappointed, but in the end he got to accomplish what he was trying to do all along - he was able to satisfy that urge that drove him onward, whatever his circumstances were. That's more than most can say. In the end, maybe the only treasure that matters is self-actualization. Hell, Dink is directly told something similar at one point.
And how can he be dissatisfied with a score like that? Death is probably going to give me a star and a half if he's feeling generous.
"Is this the river's source? I doubt it, I can't see any treasure here."
Synbi was one of my beta testers on "Malachi the Jerk." If it weren't for him, I might well have released a version that crashed frequently on regular 1.08. Thanks again to him for that.
"The River" came in second place in the contest. It's quite a big D-Mod with sidequests and an interesting story, but I'm not sure it's really a non-combat D-Mod, despite the fact that you're hardly ever given the chance to strike anything.
Dink is at home with his live-in girlfriend when the taxman comes to collect. Dink can't pay, so the collector somehow takes Dink's fist as payment. Dink never does gain the ability to punch things in this adventure. As Dink despairs about being broke, his lover attempts to console him with a saying about treasure waiting at the end of the river. This works a little too well. She tries to explain that it's only a saying and that the river is probably just the metaphorical "river of life," but Dink's mind is made up. He is determined to follow the river just outside their house all the way to its source, where he is convinced he'll find incredible riches. Indeed, although Dink's journey takes him to several different places and leads him to pursue many different goals, you never stop following that river. You can even press the R key and Dink will tell you which way the river is flowing if it's in sight, which is handy because it doesn't appear to flow in any particular direction with those ol' water tiles.
There comes a point where the flow of the river can no longer be seen, but Dink presses on anyway.
The beginning is appropriate for a story that ends up being somewhat metaphorical itself. Dink may well be following the River of Life, as the four towns Dink stops in seem to represent different phases of his life. Early on, Dink acts with the impetuousness of youth, getting drunk and starting fights. Later, he settles down with a woman (another one, too bad for his girlfriend at the start) and works a regular, boring job in order to provide for her and himself. When Dink finally arrives at the river's source, he's told that he has become old, even though his journey couldn't have taken that much time if interpreted literally. Dink does find his treasure at the end of the river, but having come to the end of the River of Life, there is nothing left to do but die.
Death has the same theme song he did in "Initiation." I approve.
It does confuse the metaphor a bit that you can always backtrack. If you go all the way back to the start and talk to Dink's old girlfriend, she asks him if he's seeing someone else. He lies and tells her that he isn't. I really don't understand why. He's clearly established a new life and has no intention of ever returning; why doesn't he just own up to it?
Speaking of backtracking, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. Along the way Dink faces some interesting challenges. He has to defend a town from monsters despite being unable to hit them (his actions later cause the destruction of the same town, so I guess it evens out). This segment is why I say "The River" isn't a non-combat D-Mod. You have to get the enemies to hit each other in order to kill them. When there's one left, you have to dodge them for a while as another character casts a spell. It's an interesting combat challenge - amusingly enough, the gameplay took me back to the time I challenged "Bill & Kill" - but it's a combat challenge nonetheless. I think the idea of the contest was to create D-Mods that did not require the player to defeat enemies.
I was impressed that the script covers the rare eventuality of the monsters wiping each other out simultaneously.
My biggest gripe with the D-Mod came around this point. There's yet another bar with patrons having a discussion in the background; here, they're debating politics. I really would prefer to avoid serious discussion of politics in a D-Mod, and this discussion annoyed me especially because I think the political opinions in question are kinda batty. Worse, the "debate" is one-sided and feels like a soapbox. I am tempted to argue against the points made here and present real-world examples of how the things this character implies would create an ideal society reliably make things much worse in practice, but I'd only be doing the same thing that got on my nerves when the D-Mod did it. These writeups aren't the place for this sort of thing either. At least you're not required to interact with this character.
There are several side objectives in this D-Mod. At the end, you receive a score based on how many of these objectives you completed. Some of the stuff you have to do to get the best rating is really obscure, and I can't imagine getting it before finding out what the criteria are in the ending unless you use the walkthrough, as I did. There were a couple of parts where it wasn't clear what to do to progress the story. I'm thinking particularly of a spot where a character tells you to meet them at the bar, and nothing happens until you walk to a totally unrelated screen. But then, my threshold for how stuck I have to get to check a walkthrough is unusually low because of the sheer volume of D-Mods I'm going through. Anyway, one of the sidequests involves making a deal with the devil, but backing out. If you go through with it, you get the bad ending.
Striker cameos in this ending. "Back from the Grave" references abound.
A considerable amount of time is taken up by the segment where you have to plant, harvest and sell crops to make enough money to pay off a house. It's a good hike to the places where you can get the best prices. Slowing you down further are occasional crop failures and Dink's old nemesis the taxman, who taxes your income every ten days (you pass a day by resting, and each crop takes a certain number of days to grow). In addition to buying the house, you can also pay to furnish it, which is one of the sidequests that contributes to your final score. The farming segment gets a little tedious, but I appreciated the new gameplay wrinkle. Besides, I think it had to be a little tedious to portray the part of Dink's life where he becomes a more responsible adult. It worked well.
This is what the house looks like when fully furnished.
I liked the atmosphere of this D-Mod. The map looked good, and the MIDI selections were excellent. Toward the end, there's a very cool segment set in an alternate dimension, where the groovy-looking space background shifts around oddly. I had to include a screenshot of this.
Yes it is.
I know the ending sounds like a downer, but I found it oddly uplifting. Dink does seem disappointed, but in the end he got to accomplish what he was trying to do all along - he was able to satisfy that urge that drove him onward, whatever his circumstances were. That's more than most can say. In the end, maybe the only treasure that matters is self-actualization. Hell, Dink is directly told something similar at one point.
And how can he be dissatisfied with a score like that? Death is probably going to give me a star and a half if he's feeling generous.
